Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

We’re in the middle of a scary, uncertain time, and we hope those of you reading are staying safe and healthy. Despite the current challenges, the 40+ members of the remote-first Netdata team have been hard at work on the next version of the Netdata Agent: v1.21.0. This release is foundational: While we do have fantastic new collectors and three new ways to export your metrics for long-term storage, many of the most significant changes aren’t even those you’ll notice.

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has forced many organizations to take unprecedented steps towards remote working. As a fully distributed team, we’ve faced the common challenges of remote work. Based on our experience from our very beginning in 2018, all but a few of these organizations new to remote working will face hurdles to overcome and may try to revert to colocation as soon as possible. Remote working is hard, even when it’s carefully planned and executed.

Netdata contributors have greatly influenced the growth of our company and are essential to our success. The time and expertise that contributors volunteer are fundamental to our goal of helping you build extraordinary infrastructures. We highly value end-user feedback during product development, which is why we’re looking to involve you in progressing our machine learning (ML) efforts!

In Netdata’s first major release of 2020, we’re introducing two new features on the opposite ends of the monitoring spectrum. On one hand, we’re releasing an eBPF collector, which lets you collect, monitor, and visualize incredibly precise metrics straight from the Linux kernel. On the other, we added the ability to label agents to help you organize entire infrastructures and see every important piece of information about streaming nodes in one place.

Your application isn’t finished when you’ve closed the last if block and you lined up all the brackets. There’s a whole other world of testing, debugging, and optimization that you haven’t even touched yet. To help you more safely step into that complex phase of making your application even better, we’ve just released a brand-new eBPF collector in v1.20 of Netdata.

Properly monitoring the health and performance of Docker containers is an essential skill for solo developers and large teams alike. As your infrastructure grows in complexity, it’s important to streamline every facet of the performance of your apps/services. Plus, it’s essential that the tools you use to make those performance decisions work across teams, and allow for complex scaling architectures.

Health monitoring and performance troubleshooting aren’t easy. That’s exactly why we’re building Netdata, to democratize monitoring and make it accessible to anyone interested in learning more about their systems and applications. Of course, teaching a complicated topic isn’t easy either. Until recently, the only resource to help new users after installation has been our getting started guide.

I wanted to follow up Ron Miller’s article in TechCrunch about Netdata’s Series A funding last month with the story of Netdata’s inception. It all started when I got… pissed off.

Network monitoring is complex, which is why we’re developing a monitoring tool that will drastically increase DevOps productivity. This release is all about improving Netdata’s day-in, day-out performance. We’re working hard to make deploy enhancements that help engineers make faster, smarter decisions about their systems.

Netdata is made up from agile teams who are deeply committed to improving the usability of our product. We want to respond to our users and introduce in-demand features. Working directly with our community is the best way to make Netdata better. But we face the same the dilemma as all agile teams: How do we do this safely?